I am pleased to be able to introduce you to the first episode of the 361 Degrees podcast. This is a podcast all about mobile technology, created by Ben Smith of Wireless Worker and co-hosted by Ewan MacLeod of Mobile Industry Review and Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian. The first episode covers the trend for the specialisation of converged smartphones, with specific discussion around the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play.
Nokia has released its Q1 2011 results, reporting an operating profit of €439 million (down 10% Year-on-Year), with net sales of €10.399 billion (up 9% YoY). Nokia's device and service division's profits were €439 million, down 10% from last year. Margins in devices and services were 9.8% (down 2.3% YoY and down 1.5% QoQ).
Total converged devices sales (mainly Symbian-powered smartphones) were 24.2 million, compared with 21.5 million units in Q1 2010 (up 13% YoY) and compared with 28.3 million units in Q4 2010 (down 14%, QoQ). Worldwide smartphone market share was 26%, down 5% sequentially and 15% year on year. Read on for more analysis and more details.
At the WIMA conference, currently under way in Monaco, Nokia and Rovio unveiled a preview of Angry Birds Magic, a version of the hit game that will be used to help promote NFC (Near Field Communication). The game, which continues the avian-porcine conflict, has levels that can only be unlocked by touching another NFC phone or NFC tag. The game will be pre-installed on Nokia C7's as part of the Symbian Anna update.
Nokia announced yesterday that the Ovi Store now reaches up to five million downloads per day. Ovi Store now contains more than 40,000 content items, representing an eight fold increase in the catalogue since last year, with approximately 1,000 additional items being added every week. Symbian^3 devices (N8, C6-01, C7 and E7) are responsible for 15% of daily downloads (750,000 per day). Read on for charts and analysis.
Nokia today introduced its fifth Symbian^3 device, the Nokia E6-00, a business and communication-focussed smartphone. With its 2.46 inch, VGA resolution capacitive touchscreen and accompanying full QWERTY keyboard it represents a continuation of the popular Nokia E71 and E72 line.
The E6 features a 8 megapixel EDoF camera, with the ability to record 720p (HD) videos, 8GB of mass memory, a microSD card slot, (the very popular) 1500 mAh BP-4L battery, integrated GPS and comprehensive connectivity options (pentaband 3G, Bluetooth, microUSB and b/g/n WiFi). It will be available, in three colour variants (Black, Silver and White) this quarter (Q2), at a cost of €340 (£300/$490) before taxes and subsidies.
Nokia recently posted a clarification that Symbian was “Not open source, but open for business”. It is worth taking a moment to consider the collaborative environment Symbian now exists in. Prior to Nokia’s deal with Microsoft, we saw the closure of the Symbian Foundation and with it, the end of Symbian’s time under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). Developers were rightly concerned about just how ‘open’ Symbian would be. Read on for our analysis.
There's an interesting editorial over at The Telegraph, quoted below, in which the author questions, as I have done several times, the prevailing wisdom over whether the current craze for 'apps' (for accessing information and services) is a good thing. The editorial starts and ends in the pub, which is a good start to some decent left-field thinking. Why use 'apps' when we have the Web itself? Surely what we need is a better and more intelligent Web?
Please excuse the original story on this address, I was going by item numbers in Ovi Store URLs - it turns out that there isn't a strict one to-one correspondance between URL numbers and actual content items. The store simply now has over 100,000 allocated item IDs, many of which never materialised into content. Watch this space for some fuller Ovi Store statistics.
Widely reported in the media today is the leak of an internal Nokia 'memo', penned by Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop. It lays out the problems facing Nokia, most notably around its software strategy, and argues that Nokia is "standing on a burning platform" with a choice to be made about the future. And what is that choice? That's what we'll be finding out on Friday, when Nokia holds its Analyst and Financial event (Capital Markets Day).
Following his 4500 word part 1 of the All About Symbian review of the Nokia E7, Rafe also took time to shoot a comprehensive 14 minute video (embedded below), up close and personal with the device. If you haven't got time to work through the review text, sit back with a cup of tea and watch this instead. The video focusses on the hardware, especially the QWERTY keyboard and with some nice comparisons to previous Communicators, but Rafe also covers some elements of the Symbian^3 software and Ovi services that power the device.
Without word of mouth, the success of an application depends on getting into an App store, and making it easy to find. The approval process of application stores is a frequently complained about issue in the developer world, and the Ovi Store is not immune from these complaints. Therefore, if you are a developer looking to get into the Ovi Store, there are a few things you should bear in mind... Read on to find out.
Nokia have put in place plans to close the all-you-can-eat version of the Ovi Music store. Originally called Comes with Music, and currently branded as Ovi Music Unlimited, the service was available with a select number of handsets, including the X6 and N97 Mini. Nokia have no plans to supply this handset/service combination beyond the end of this year to the majority of territories.
An interesting few thoughts from Pat Phelan (Head of Innovation at Cubic Telecom) based around SMS. The starting point is the impending tidal wave of text messages of “congratulations and all the best” and the realisation that while he personally can’t stand them, for network operators this time of year is a license to print money. Is SMS usage going down? Yes, but not in a significant number. The simple reason is that there’s nothing easy to replace it.
Marko Ahtisaari, SVP of industrial design at Nokia, was one of the guest speakers at this year's LeWeb Conference. He covered topics from dominant designs of smartphone user interface and collective intelligence with mobile devices. He outlined why he sees that there's plenty of work to be done in the world of mobile user experience, particularly in having mobile devices actually demand less of our attention. In his view, iOS is "beautifully elegant and fantastically constrained", while Symbian and Android actually share the same design pattern but differ greatly in their business models. Read on for a in-depth account of the speech and Q&A session.
AAS fans might like to note that our very own Rafe Blandford and David Gilson have been the guests on The Phones Show Chat podcast over the last two weeks, Rafe in chat 64 and David in chat 63, providing analysis with their own particular slant, notably with much mention of MeeGo, still prominent in the news following the conference last week, but also with masses of Symbian chat as well. Worth a listen to one of them over your lunch-hour? Also, see below for an important URL change for 3-Lib and The Phones Show - my old web server is disappearing up Sky's tailpipe at the end of 2010!
